The other thing I had not counted on at this school was the behavior of children. In my fantasies, we had marched down the city’s wide avenues in ruler-straight ranks, our brass shining in the sun, our long trousers in perfect step. But children, it turned out, took your snacks, turned your pencil box upside down, punched you in the arm or other places, pushed you down, yelled French obscenities in your face, and had bad breath. To none of these had I any effective response.
They did, of course, all speak Polish as well, and would do so when a message had to be delivered with particular accuracy, such as, “Go to the devil, you stupid!” And most of the recess-talk in the hall outside our classroom—we apparently did not have a yard—was, in fact, Polish. But they seemed to take great pleasure in addressing me in French, pointing their fingers at me, mimicking my facial expressions, and going into fits of laughter.
At first this surprised me. I knew about witches and giants and evil step parents whose nature—in fact their profession—was to do hurtful things. But the idea of ordinary individuals generating spontaneous anger and cruelty was simply outside my realm of experience. Then, when I noticed how many of them wore crosses and other religious medals around their necks, I finally understood what was taking place. It was not that I accused my tormentors of anti-Semitism—prejudice on a human level was not a concept to which I had yet been introduced. But the Heavenly variety was something with which I, of course, was well familiar. Clear as day, I suddenly saw in their treatment of me, the hand of the Almighty exacting due punishment for what we had done to His Son.
This realization did not mean that I automatically bowed my head to the inevitable. I remember one occasion during joint recess with the second grade, which we did one or two times a week, when I discovered a second grader with shiny metal rods strapped to both sides of one leg. In an effort, I suppose, to join what I obviously couldn’t beat, I pointed to him and laughed. “Look at those things on his leg!” I said. I was immediately pummeled for my insensitivity.
When, at home that evening, I explained how I had acquired my bruises, my story apparently prompted a visit to the principal by my mother. I did not know about the visit until my classmates came to advise me of the fact, just before adding some black-and-blue marks to complement the ones that were just beginning to fade.
This time, I reported to Kiki that I had tripped on my way down the stairs and acquired the bruises bouncing off the walls as I tried to maintain an upright position. It was the first time I had ever lied to her. My mother did, however, take some occasion to point out how well the previous matter had been taken care of by my simply reporting it at home, and that this should convince me to continue the practice in the future.
A delegation of girls approached me at recess several days later to inform me in what was obviously a well-rehearsed speech, that they were sorry for Marina, but they were not sorry for me. Who Marina was and how she merited their pity, I do not know to this day. The fact that they did not harbor the same sympathy towards me, I took as a matter of course by then. I had already come to terms with the fact that I was not to be treated like other people. It may even have had some connection with my birdie.
Some weeks later, a chubby girl named Vana did offer me half of her banana at recess. Since I had my own orange, this was quite clearly a gesture of friendship rather than charity. While I accepted both the banana and the friendship, sharing with her my opinion of our fat and homely teacher, Mlle Pro, I could not have much respect for Vana’s choice of friends and made no effort to extend our relationship beyond the one-recess stand.
In my parents’ bedroom, there stood a radio. It was a magnificent polished wood and cloth structure, about the size of a present-day twenty-one-inch television, with two vertical glass dials. One dial had numbers etched into the glass, the other the names of cities like London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. When the radio was turned on, either the numbers on one dial or the cities on the other would light up. In the center was a round green eye by which you fine-tuned the apparatus. I was not allowed to touch any part of the machine.
When my parents were away, Kiki and Marta would frequently sit by this instrument and listen with great concern to news reports. It seemed that a war was coming with Germany. Sometimes we listened to speeches, on several occasions by Adolph Hitler. None of the three of us spoke German, but there was a hypnotic and frightening quality to his voice.
Marshal Jusef Pilsucki, the George Washington of twentieth-century Poland, had died a few years earlier, and his place as Poland’s protector had been taken by a General Ritz-Smigwy. I remember that the general did not inspire in me the confidence that I would have had in the great marshal. Returning from the park where we went before school, Kiki and I would on occasion encounter the general as he walked, presumably to lunch, along one of the boulevards we crossed. In his silver-braided uniform, he would march with military strides along the sidewalk, followed by several officers and two or three men in civilian dress.
One day, it was decided that I should stop him and ask for his autograph. I was horror stricken by the idea, but those were my orders. The year before, Mother had returned from Vienna with a little white homburg for me and a box of visiting cards with my name embossed in letters you could feel with your finger. Mercifully, after being photographed in the homburg, I never had to remove the hat from its box again. The visiting cards remained equally undisturbed until the morning on which I was to confront the general. Kiki and I were instructed by my mother to wait along his route until he appeared, at which point I was to march forward, salute, and say, “Would the general please give me his autograph.” Then I was to present him with the back of my visiting card and a pen.
To try and talk my way out of this plan, I knew would be futile. “Little soldiers obey orders,” I had been taught, along with, “Little soldiers don’t cry.” Armed to the teeth with saber, pistol, and rifle, I was propelled at the appropriate moment into the general’s path. Quaking with fear, I carried out my assignment without a hitch. The general returned my salute, took the card and the pen, and delivered his signature as requested.
“Thank you, General,” I even adlibbed, turned on my heel, and marched back to my beaming governess. As we headed for home, we were overtaken by two of the general’s civilian companions who demanded to inspect the card as well as my two firearms before releasing us. That evening, a third man appeared at the door of our apartment and asked numerous questions of my parents.
January thirteenth was my seventh birthday. That morning, a man in the knee-high boots of a manual laborer, was in our salon inflating balloons. In the dining room, the table was removed and the carpet rolled to one end of the room, three or four feet short of the wall, and covered with bed sheets. The carpet pad was similarly deployed at the other end.
Some time in the afternoon, children began arriving. Who they were, I had no idea. I knew Anita, Andy, and Fredek. I hoped none of the guests would turn out to be my classmates, and so far as I could tell, none were.
The same man I had seen earlier inflating balloons came out of the kitchen carrying a large carton. Setting it down, he went back for another. Kiki and Anita’s governess reached into the cartons and proceeded to hand each child a rifle and an army hat. These were not the green uniform caps you saw on the street, but the tall red hats with the flaring square tops that the Ulans wore in parades. Then we were told to lie behind the rolled carpet and padding at both ends of the room and shoot at each other. A photographer appeared and took pictures with flash bulbs.
Some days later, I was shown a photograph clipped from the newspaper. It showed my guests shooting rifles from behind the carpet barricade. My mother was in the middle of the photograph, an Ulan hat cocked over one eye, a rifle to her shoulder. I did not seem to be anywhere in the picture.
At the end of the summer following my first grade year, Kiki and I returned from the shore to find Warsaw plastered with posters calling for volunteers for the army and donations of mone
y and metal for armaments. We carried the contents of my piggy bank to a designated place. Whether they would be used to buy bullets or melted down for guns, I wasn’t sure. Our car, I overheard, had been requisitioned by the government along with all other private cars. This was the first I had heard of our owning a car.
We were issued gas masks which we were instructed to wear slung over our shoulders in their canisters whenever we went outdoors. They had a hose in front connecting to the canister, the bottom of which must have been an air filter. The pistol and saber I wore to the park were toys, but my gas mask was real.
The reality of the gas mask was emphasized to me when I was told not to play with it. I looked forward to our first bombing raid, when I would be allowed to put it on. It had a terrible rubber smell, but it would be worth it. Then Kiki instructed me that after putting the mask on, I was to close my eyes tightly until the attack was over. She would lead me by the hand to the nearest shelter. This was dreadful news and, I believed, unfair. I had read all the instructions on posters and pamphlets, and not a word had been mentioned about closing your eyes inside the gas mask. I could visualize myself being led down the street in my mask like a blind elephant while others, adults and kids, watched the airplanes dueling overhead.
We tacked black paper over our windows and Marta became an air raid warden with an armband, a whistle, a flashlight, and a helmet in addition to her gas mask. We began digging trenches across our streets. Men and women would show up with shovels to dig into the earth in front of our house. I with my child-sized shovel and Kiki with a dustpan, went downstairs to help. Lolek was there, stripped to the waist in the August sun with the other men, heaving shovelfuls of dirt up onto the pavement. Kiki and I were put to smoothing the walls. There was singing and laughter.
“If the women could take their shirts off,” I heard Lolek say, “we’d get this job done a lot faster.” There was laughter all through the trench.
I experienced the confusing feeling of embarrassment at the content, amusement at the humor, and pride that it was my stepfather whose words everyone was laughing at. I looked at Kiki and was surprised to see her smile. I wondered whether she really found it funny or was humoring her employer.
Then the announcement came that the Germans had penetrated our border. Immediately there were sirens and more announcements on the radio. “Air raid on the city of Warsaw! Air raid on the city of Warsaw!” the announcer proclaimed. I ran out onto the balcony off our salon to pass the announcement on to people in the street. “Air raid on the city of Warsaw!” I shouted. I looked for airplanes in the sky.
Kiki pulled me by the hand back into the apartment. A reserve officer in the army, as I learned just then, Lolek was about to report for duty at the barracks. As I approached to say goodbye, Lolek caught sight of my wristwatch. It was a waterproof, shock resistant “pilot’s” watch with a radium dial. I had received it for my birthday.
“I will need that watch in battle,” Lolek said. “Mine is gold and could get damaged.” With great reluctance, but knowing it my patriotic duty, I unbuckled my watch.
“Yulian has a knife,” my mother said. She was referring to the small hunting knife in its leather sheath that I had been recently given as a symbol of trust in my maturity. “He would love for you to have it.” I was sent to fetch that as well. The last time I saw Lolek for the next nine years, he was standing in the elevator strapping on my waterproof, shock resistant, pilot’s watch with a radium dial, the handle of my hunting knife sticking out of his suit coat pocket.
We didn’t go to the park any more. The following day Mother was up by the time Kiki and I had our breakfast. She was fully dressed in a dress that was attractive, but plain at the same time. I had seen Mother in a cocktail dress, a long evening gown, or a bathrobe, but never anything like this. She was on the telephone a great deal. Kiki’s attention was fixed mostly on things other than me, and I felt a totally new sense of existence. Where I had been the epicenter of a small satellite world, I now felt a part of the real one. The loss of my wrist-watch and hunting knife, the two symbols of my manhood, was no longer a factor. They, I knew, had only been symbols. This was reality.
I watched my mother, Kiki, and Marta packing cartons of canned and packaged food for storage in each of the apartment’s rooms. This, I had been told, was in the event that the other rooms were destroyed by bombs or somebody was trapped in one room. The three women (I don’t remember what had become of Susan) apportioned the food with great care, maintaining equality among the boxes’ contents. Dried fruit, cellophane bags of bread, tins of meat and vegetables, jars of water, were all sealed with a wide tape and packed carefully. It was actually Marta who seemed to be directing the operation, my mother asking for and following instructions. There seemed to be a mutual respect among the three women that gave me a strange feeling of security and pleasure.
The air raid siren sounded several times that first day after Lolek’s departure, and we moved in an orderly way into the front hall, the only room without windows, to sit on the floor and wait for the all-clear. Nobody needed to tell me what to do, and nobody tried.
We heard a rumbling in the distance. “Bombs,” Marta said. It didn’t sound anything like what I expected bombs to sound like. I had expected individual explosions, like the ones my cousin Fredek made with his mouth, not a continuous sound. It was the distance, I decided.
“Is it the barracks?” Mother asked.
“No,” Marta assured her. “The barracks are in a residential area. It must be the factories.”
“You’re right,” Mother said. “If they bombed the barracks, they might hit civilian homes.” If they didn’t bomb civilians, I wondered why we had packed those food boxes so diligently.
I knew I shouldn’t be wishing for bombs to fall closer to us, and I struggled not to, with only partial success. I waited anxiously to go out after the air raid and see the damage, but Kiki said no to my suggestion.
Actually, it may have been voicing that wish that became my undoing. As soon as the air raid ended, Kiki set me to work writing a letter to my newly departed stepfather. While I had not learned much in my first year of school, Kiki had taught me the alphabet, and theoretically I was capable of scratching out a three-sentence letter on my own, an activity that would keep me occupied the better part of the next hour.
This brought my new reality of belonging and maturity to a sudden end. As I sat at the little table in my room and worked to shape the letters that would spell out the compulsory sentiments, I fanatisized a future relationship between me and Kiki in which I, a good six inches taller than she, announced my decision to take a walk to inspect the bomb damage, and Kiki, a paid employee after all, had little choice but to put on her sweater and accompany me.
My fantasy and my letter writing were both interrupted by Marta’s announcement that the airport, only a short distance from our house, was on fire. We rushed, I with a newly found freedom, onto the balcony to see a huge cloud of black smoke floating towards our street.
As the four of us stood on two balconies, Kiki and I on one, my mother and Marta on another, I felt a presence in this dark, churning mass approaching our street. I saw it quite clearly as a masculine presence coming into my life. War was waged by men, and already this war had begun to loosen the controls with which women held me. Two days ago I would not have been permitted to dash that way from my letter to the balcony. Nor, I realized, would I have had the courage to try. In Kiki, standing beside me, I could see fear. I had never seen fear before, but in her face, as she looked at the on-coming cloud, I recognized fear.
Nobody told me to finish my letter, and I never did.
The telephone rang, and it was Lolek. They had not bombed the barracks. But they had destroyed some buildings nearby, he said.
“My God, they bombed civilians?” I heard Mother ask. They agreed it must have been a mistake. Kiki, Marta, and I stood in her bedroom as Mother sat on the bed and talked on the phone.
“When are the
British and the French coming into the war?” she asked him. The answer didn’t reassure Mother. “But they have to,” she said. “They signed a treaty. People are being killed.” It was common knowledge that as soon as Britain and France honored our mutual defense treaty and declared war on Germany, Hitler would back off.
That evening Kiki and I ate dinner with Mother in the dining room. We had eaten in the dining room before when certain guests were there, but this was the first time that it was just the three of us. We sat at the polished wood table with round ends and a carved edge. It must have seated six, and had extension leaves. There was a sideboard with the same carvings and a long, gilt framed mirror over it, suspended by cords from the molding at the top of the wall. The chair seats were padded silk and slippery.
As we waited for Marta to bring out the food, Mother said, “Let us ask God to watch over us and our loved ones at this time.” She folded her hands and bowed her head. I saw Kiki cross herself and then do the same. Instinctively; I followed Kiki’s example. Then, looking down into my folded hands, I realized what I had done in front of my mother. I did not look up again until I heard Marta come in with a tray.
I knew that Mother knew that I frequently accompanied Kiki to Mass. How much she had known about my being a closet Catholic, I had no idea. What she was thinking now, I had no idea.
Then I thought of the early Christian martyrs who, Kiki had told me, had gone gladly to be eaten by lions rather than deny their faith. And here I was afraid of risking my mother’s displeasure on account of mine. This crossroads, I realized, was an opportunity—an opportunity to prove my faith to God. I raised my head. I had no idea what Mother would make of this, but, for the first time in my life, I knew God was on my side.
Mother and Me Page 3